Our current working models of “governance” in #opensource are mostly:
Monarchy – the dictator for life. Aristocracy – the devs. Oligarchy – NGOs/funders. And way out on the edge: Democracy – the users.
We need better governance native to the #openweb. Let’s look at this at a more personal level before the normal wider social view. Yes, in #FOSS development the devs doing the work deserve respect, and #OMN isn’t arguing that users should simply demand things from volunteers.
The point about “aristocracy” is about more where decision-making power sits, less whether devs are privileged people or whether their work has value. If the people who write and maintain the code also decide what the project is, what gets built, what gets rejected and how the project develops, then you have a governance structure where technical expertise becomes political authority.
Hope am clear, that isn’t a criticism of individual developers, it’s a structural observation. The #OMN approach is to separate doing the work from owning the direction. Developers are essential participants, but so are users, moderators, communities and other contributors. Different kinds of knowledge need different kinds of power.
The challenge is building governance where devs don’t get bossed around by users, users don’t get bossed around by devs, funders don’t get to buy the direction, and nobody gets to become the permanent ruler.
That’s what the #OGB work is trying to explore: governance native to the #openweb, based on trust, transparency, participation and voluntary cooperation. This alternative isn’t “users rule”, it’s shared power with different roles.
With this in mind lets talk about the wider issue, a reminder: when I talk about the internet and society, I am not necessarily talking about you, I am talking about groups, cultures, classes, institutions and patterns of behaviour that you might be part of. You can recognise yourself in a critique without the critique being a personal attack – Simple – Take the useful bit and move on.
What is interesting – and a pretty good example of #stupidindividualism – is how difficult this has become. We increasingly seem to believe that we are not allowed to talk about groups any more. Everything has to be reduced to the individual “Are you saying I’m stupid?” “Are you attacking me?” “Who exactly are you talking about?” This makes it difficult to discuss social patterns, and that matters because many of the problems we face are not individual problems. They are produced by relationships between people, institutions, technologies and economic systems.
If we cannot talk about groups, we cannot talk properly about the #geekproblem, #mainstreaming, the #dotcons, #NGOs and funders, tech communities, activist cultures, class interests, institutional power, #neoliberalism or the wider #deathcult culture. We end up privatising a public conversation.
This is one of the things that makes #dotcons-style social media so destructive, as everything becomes personalised, emotional and reactive when structural criticism gets turned into interpersonal conflict. But a feeling is not a fact, a feeling attacked does not necessarily mean someone is attacking you. Sometimes it means that something has made you uncomfortable, or challenged a worldview you have become accustomed to.
That discomfort can actually be useful as the point isn’t to find individuals to blame, the point is to understand the systems and cultures we are collectively caught inside. We need to get beyond the #neoliberal#TINA – There Is No Alternative – thinking that reduces everything to individual choice and responsibility. We need to be able to say – This is a group pattern, a cultural pattern, a class interest, an institutional problem. It’s about how power reproduces itself, then we can actually talk about what to do about it. That is the conversation we need to reclaim: public, collective and capable of naming the structures that shape our lives.
Remember none of this is about personal attacks, not tribal prat fights, not individualised outrage. It’s a public conversation about public problems.
The problems we face in the #openweb are often presented as technology problems. Which protocol, platform, licence, federation path, software? Which standard? These questions matter, but they are not the foundations of the problem. A lot of what we are seeing is really a cultural clash. Different parts of the alternative tech world have different ideas about what technology is for, who it should serve, how much control is acceptable, how open something needs to be, and how much compromise is useful? That difference isn’t necessarily a weakness, when we nurture this it can be our strength.
To do this we need to support, fund and actually use a wide range of #openweb technologies, as there is no single “right path” waiting to be discovered. The #openweb should be a messy ecosystem, some projects will be radical, others pragmatic by compromising with existing institutions. Some will refuse every compromise, some will be technically elegant, were others will be slightly ugly but actually useful. Some people will be idealists, some will be organisers, geeks, activists – some will be experimenters, others will be complete weirdos.
We need all of these people. Even the “sellouts” can push open technology into places that fundamentalists cannot reach. The fundamentalists can protect principles that pragmatists might otherwise throw away. The pragmatists can make things usable, while the experimenters can discover things nobody expected and the weirdos can see possibilities that the sensible people completely miss.
The problem starts when any one of these groups decides that they are the whole movement. Then diversity becomes tribalism, difference becomes factionalism and criticism attack. And eventually everyone starts spending more energy defeating people who are broadly on the same side as building the commons we actually need. We’ve seen this mess before, the history of alternative technology is full of splits between people who wanted to build practical infrastructure and people who wanted purity, between technical communities and social movements, between centralised coordination and decentralised autonomy.
The lesson shouldn’t be “pick the correct side” – it needs to be – learn how to work with difference. This is particularly important now because the #dotcons have already demonstrated what happens when a technical ecosystem becomes dominated by a few powerful platforms. Monoculture creates dependency, creates control that leads to vulnerability. The answer to this simply cannot be to build another monoculture with different branding, we need plural infrastructure, based on #KISS#openweb native standards that communicate with each other.
That is where #FOSS based on open standards and the #4opens become important, they give a common floor without demanding a common culture. We don’t need everyone to agree, but we need enough openness that different projects can coexist, exchange knowledge and build on each other’s work. This is also why projects such as #OMN, #OGB, #IndymediaBack and #MakingHistory shouldn’t be understood as competing for the one correct future. They are paths, pieces of a wider ecosystem.
Buts yes the important thing is to keep the commons alive while we experiment. The value isn’t in choosing one tribe and defeating the others, value is in creating conditions where difference can coexist, challenge assumptions, learn from failure and grow something wider than any individual project. We need disagreement without fragmentation, criticism without destruction and experimentation without constant reinvention. To make this work we also need pragmatism without selling everything out.
To help compost the #geekproblem we need technology that serves the social projects rather than becoming the social project. That means supporting the native diversity, contradictions and productive tensions that make an ecosystem resilient. And yes, you are right there are to meany people being prats currently on this subject.
For those of us who’ve spent the last twenty years working around alternative technology, grassroots media and activism, the hardest thing to watch has been how deeply the #dotcons have become embedded in the culture. We know the problems, we’ve been talking about surveillance, extraction, algorithmic manipulation, platform lock-in and the destruction of community for years. And yet we keep going back, not because people are stupid, but because addiction is powerful – especially when the thing you’re addicted to is also where everyone else is.
This is where #mainstreaming becomes such a problem. People have been, and still are, vile in their interactions with the alternatives. Instead of helping build something different, too much energy gets spent defending the existing system, attacking people trying alternatives, or having endless prat fights about which alternative is ideologically pure enough. The result? We waste years fighting each other while the #dotcons keep growing.
Our #mainstreaming crew/friends are always pushing pointless fights over alternatives, while defending the obvious worship of the #deathcult – forty years of #neoliberal “common sense” normalised extraction, competition, growth and individual consumption as if these were laws of nature, they aren’t, they are political choices. And “common sense” built around those choices is going to take time – and a lot of messy work – to change.
That’s what we mean by composting, not throwing people away, not creating another subculture purity club. Taking the accumulated #techshit, failed projects, bad assumptions, ego battles, corporate habits and activist baggage and turning it into something useful. Because dumping Big Tech isn’t just a matter of personal politics, it isn’t even primarily about “tech sovereignty” – that is another con when sovereignty means building our own little versions of the same extractive systems. It’s about survival – Big Tech is the latest flag-bearer for our recurring worship of #deathcults.
After living through this mess, we don’t need another shiny platform, we need to recover the ability to build things together. Small-scale, federated, open, human, trust-based, with memory and governance. With communities that can survive the failure of the latest #dotcons or #fashionista platform. That’s the point of the #openweb, #FOSS, #Indymedia and projects like #OMN. Not another tech fashion, more a way out of the addiction. So, grab a shoal and compost this mess, please.
Just because you feel attacked doesn’t mean someone is attacking you, sometimes that feeling is worth listening to, it may be telling you that something doesn’t fit with how you currently see the world. But a feeling is not a fact, this matters because much political discussion now begins and ends with personal reactions rather than examining the underlying structures.
Take the hashtag #stupidindividualism. Many people read it as, “You’re stupid because you’re an individual.” That isn’t what it means, the intended meaning is: The form of individualism promoted under capitalism makes us think and act in ways that become self-defeating.
The criticism is not of individuality, individuality is valuable. The criticism is of an ideology that teaches us to see every problem as personal and every solution as individual, even when the problems are obviously social, economic or ecological. This is what we mean by #stupidindividualism.
When every issue becomes “my opinion”, “my identity”, “my choice”, or “my feed”, we lose the ability to understand systems. We stop asking how institutions, technology, economics and culture shape our lives together. That isn’t stupidity as an individual trait, it’s a social condition.
The same misunderstanding appears whenever we talk about #mainstreaming or the #deathcult. When we say #mainstreaming thinking has become “insane”, I’m not saying that individual people are crazy. I’m saying that forty years of neoliberal common sense has normalised behaviours that are collectively destructive.
Endless economic growth on a finite planet, treating community as a market, replacing trust with metrics, replacing politics with branding and replacing human judgement with algorithms. These ideas have become “common sense”, yet they are driving us deeper into #climatechaos and reinforcing the #geekproblem, where technical fixes are repeatedly offered for problems that are fundamentally social.
The same pattern appears across the #Fediverse. Most people are acting in good faith, but many default to familiar #FOSS assumptions without asking deeper political questions. Most newcomers have little knowledge of the history of the #openweb, making it easier for corporate interests, NGOs and well-meaning developers to reshape the space according to the assumptions of the wider #closedweb.
Without governance that fits the culture (#OGB), fragmentation is inevitable. Without trust, federation becomes increasingly fragile – without memory, every generation repeats the same mistakes. Rebooting the #openweb isn’t primarily a technical challenge, it’s a social one. The first step is recognising that not every uncomfortable idea is a personal attack, sometimes discomfort is simply the beginning of thinking.
Q, The #Fediverse seams to kinda be on autopilot at the moment – I miss the days when the community was more focused….
A. I’d say it’s growing and changing. From my window, there’s a LOT happening. Many people are excited by the new stuff that’s landing, while others are afraid of how those changes may rock the boat they’re on.My solution is to build a bigger boat, because everyone needs the opportunity to be here. But that’s understandably scary for those who want a very small, exclusive community. Hopefully we can make tools that give affordances for both.
My metaphorical thinking on this is, yes, there is a lot of technical activity. New software, new protocols, bridges, funding, organisations and experiments. From that perspective, the #Fediverse is very active. But socially, it often feels like it’s on autopilot.
In the early years there was a shared sense that we were rebuilding the #openweb together. There were arguments, of course, but there was also a common direction. People were asking social questions about ownership, governance, federation and community. Those conversations created momentum beyond individual projects.
Today much of that shared vision has fragmented. Each project has its own roadmap, each server its own concerns, each funding stream its own priorities. That’s healthy to a point, but without a wider narrative the movement risks becoming a collection of software projects rather than a #openweb social movement.
I agree that we need a bigger boat. The internet needs one. But the question is what kind of boat are we building? If becoming bigger simply means attracting more users while reproducing the culture of the #dotcons, we’ve missed the point. Federation alone doesn’t create commons. We can decentralise servers while recentralising culture, governance and influence.
This is where the #OMN perspective differs from the current #mainstreaming. The challenge isn’t only scaling infrastructure – it’s scaling communities. A bigger boat still needs lots of crew who know how to sail it, repair it and decide together where it’s going. Without that, people become passengers rather than participants.
The #Fediverse already has the technical foundations. What it lacks is enough shared social infrastructure: ways to build trust, preserve collective memory, govern openly and connect local communities into something larger without creating another centre of power. That’s why I keep talking about #DIY, #MakingHistory and the #4opens. They aren’t distractions from the technology, they’re the missing social layer. The code is necessary, but code alone won’t build the commons.
Perhaps the feeling of “autopilot” comes from this imbalance. We’re very good at building new features, but much less good at building shared purpose. The result is #techchurn: lots of movement, but not always much direction.
So yes, let’s build a bigger boat, but let’s also build more harbours, more local communities, shared stories and more reasons for people to become co-builders instead of just users. Because the strength of the #openweb has never come from one magnificent ship.
It has always come from a sea full of small boats, travelling together without needing a single captain.
Update It’s interesting that there’s still so much denial about this history. To be clear, I’m not blaming the people who arrived in the #Fediverse after the shift in the first five years of its development. They only know the culture they arrived in. It’s understandable that many assume this is how the project has always been.
What needs to be better understood is that, for roughly the first five years, the #Fediverse and #ActivityPub were driven primarily as a social and political project. The technology mattered, but it was there to serve the wider goal of rebuilding #FOSS commons-based infrastructure and supporting subculture communities. The people doing the work were mostly motivated by those social and political aims, with technical and #mainstreaming perspectives forming a minority.
After that period, the balance shifted. As the network grew, technical concerns, institutional interests and #mainstreaming priorities became dominant, while the social and political vision became a minority. The conversation increasingly focused on software, scaling and features, rather than governance, commons, trust and community.
Neither perspective is wrong on its own. We need both. The problem is that the shift happened without much reflection, and today many people are simply unaware that it happened at all. There are now very few people left who have lived through both periods and can bridge the divide. Their experience matters because they remember why many of these projects were started in the first place.
The real frustration is with those few people who do know this history, who experienced the transition firsthand, yet now deny or minimise that it happened. That denial makes it much harder to have an honest conversation about where we are and where we need to go.
For everyone who arrived later, the response shouldn’t be blame – it should be curiosity. Every movement has a history, and understanding that history helps explain why today’s arguments keep repeating themselves. This isn’t unique to the #Fediverse. It’s a common pattern in grassroots projects. As movements grow, they become more institutional, more technical and more professionalised. The original political purpose fades into the background, and new participants naturally assume the current culture is the whole story.
If we want to avoid repeating that cycle, the first step is simple – Acknowledge that the shift happened. Only then can we decide, together, what kind of #Fediverse we want to build next.
History shows that societies can normalize destructive ideas until they become “common sense.” The tragedy of the Irish Famine illustrates how blinded dogmatic thinking becomes more powerful than human need. Food existed, yet the prevailing political economy treated markets, property rights, and profit as more important than preventing mass suffering. The disaster was not simply natural; it was shaped by human choices and by the values those choices expressed.
Today we face a different crisis, but one driven by the same logic. The #deathcult metaphor tells us that the right to extract, pollute, and profit need to be better balanced with the right of communities to defend the ecosystems they depend on. This isn’t currently in any real balance. Over the last forty years we’ve shifted the political centre so far toward markets and private accumulation that environmental destruction is treated as normal, while protecting the commons is portrayed as extreme.
If we continue to use our current “common sense” to “balance” destruction against survival, destruction wins. Climate breakdown isn’t negotiated with, ecosystems don’t compromise, physics doesn’t vote. The task is therefore not to seek a mythical middle ground, but to move the social balance back towards the real commons, cooperation, stewardship, and long-term thinking. Only by changing what society sees as “common sense” do we have any realistic hope of avoiding deeper ecological and social collapse.
This is where the #OMN comes in, the #OMN is not simply another technology project. It is an attempt to shift power away from the #dotcons and away from the #geekproblem that has dominated so much of the #openweb. Instead of platforms extracting value from people, or technical elitists deciding what everyone else needs, the path is to place power back in the hands of the people who actually create culture, knowledge, and media.
The #4opens provide the practical framework: open data, open source, open standards, and open process. Together they create the conditions for shared ownership, transparency, and trust rather than enclosure and extraction.
The #OGB complements this by providing grassroots governance. Rather than relying on central authorities or corporate gatekeepers, it explores ways communities can make decisions together while remaining federated and autonomous.
None of this guarantees good outcomes, technology never does. What these projects do is create the possibility for healthier social relationships. They build commons infrastructure instead of proprietary platforms, they distribute power instead of concentrating it, they make cooperation easier than enclosure. As the future is not determined by technology alone, it is determined by the values embedded in the systems we build and the communities that choose to use them.
That’s why the real struggle isn’t simply over software, t’s over the values that software embodies. #KISS reminds us to keep these solutions simple enough for ordinary people to understand, use, and shape themselves. Without that, the commons will once again be enclosed by experts, corporations, or bureaucracies, and we will repeat catastrophes like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland) in todays rush towards #climatechaos.
The choice is ours. The tools matter because they shape the possibilities. What we build with them remains a collective responsibility.
The #WSocialmess is about more than one failed platform, it exposes a deeper problem with the EU’s approach to digital sovereignty. If Europe is serious about sovereignty, it needs to stop confusing European ownership with digital freedom. A platform hosted in Europe built as a proprietary, venture-capital project recreates the same #dotcons model under a European flag. Changing the server location doesn’t change the underlying power relationships.
This matters because the European Commission has spent years promoting open standards, interoperability, user choice and open source through its own policy. Yet when it came to practice, it publicly embraced a platform moving in the opposite direction: closed development, identity verification, restricted participation and a business model built around enclosure rather than the commons.
This contradiction should not simply be criticised on social media. It needs to be challenged within the EU’s own institutions. The issue isn’t whether #WSocialsucceeds or fails. The issue is whether public institutions are reinforcing closed corporate platforms while claiming to champion openness. That contradiction deserves formal scrutiny and, where appropriate, legal challenge.
The broader problem is cultural as much as legal. Too much European digital policy remains trapped in #mainstreaming thinking:
Replace American monopolies with European monopolies.
Replace Silicon Valley venture capital with European venture capital.
Replace one gatekeeper with another.
That isn’t digital sovereignty.
Real sovereignty (what every that means) comes from building digital commons that nobody owns and everybody can use. That’s why the #4opens matter: open data, open source, open standards and open process. These aren’t ideological preferences; they’re practical safeguards against the next generation of vendor lock-in.
The #Fediverse already demonstrates the path we need to be on. It’s messy, imperfect and decentralised, and those are strengths, not weaknesses. The challenge is to improve these commons rather than abandon it for the latest corporate platform wrapped in European branding.
Europe needs courage to defend the digital commons it already has. And perhaps the hardest truth is, successful European alternatives are unlikely to come from institutionsalone. They will come from communities, public-interest developers, grassroots organisations and #FOSS projects building native #openweb infrastructure from the ground up, institutions should be supporting that commons.
When they don’t (and they won’t) then a three-pronged prodding attack to help balance this mess they make.
The internet didn’t become broken overnight, it drifted from being a network of communities into a marketplace dominated by platforms whose purpose is extracting value. This is the logic of #dotcons most of us invested our lives and community into. How did we get into this mess? The problem isn’t only bad companies, it’s that our digital lives depend entirely on proprietary #dotcons paths and software, commercial interests end up controlling our reality.
This is why #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) matters. The “free” in #FOSS is about freedom, the freedom to use, study, modify and share the tools that shape our lives. Those freedoms create something much more important than software, they create #4opens social power. Open code means community accountability.
Instead of trusting #closedweb corporations, we can build “native” trust through transparency. That changes how communities work as closed platforms create consumers, open projects create participants. The community doesn’t just use the infrastructure, it becomes in part responsible for maintaining it. We can exit to a more #DIY path, were anyone can inspect, improve, challenge and adapt to disparate community needs.
This isn’t always the fastest path as open collaboration is often messy. Consensus takes time, criticism can be uncomfortable. But these are social strengths, not weaknesses. Diverse communities find problems earlier, reduce hidden bias and create paths and systems that are more resilient because they are shared.
The #OMN approach builds on this real world path and body of ideas. That technology can strengthen communities rather than replacing them, code can support human trust rather than algorithms deciding everything. Infrastructure should belong to the commons rather than becoming another private enclosure.
Today’s #closedweb social media platforms are digital landlords. Yes you may build a following, create value and invest years of work, but you’re still a tenant. The rules can change overnight, your reach can disappear, your community can be fragmented at the click of a button.
The #openweb offers another path were we have control of identity and content to connect through open protocols instead of closed silos. We need this more than ever to building communities that can survive the failure – or hostility – of any single platform.
We can’t keep repeating the same mess, this composting matters even more in the age of #AI. If the software, models and infrastructure are closed, then a handful of companies determine how knowledge is created, filtered and shared. If they are open, communities can inspect them, improve them and govern them together.
The future isn’t simply open source software, it’s open source society. That means investing back into the commons we depend on. Maintaining infrastructure, supporting contributors, building institutions that outlast individuals. Planting trees whose shade we may never sit under.
That’s what #OMN is about. Not simply writing better code, but helping build a better social fabric for the #openweb. Because freedom isn’t something technology gives us, it’s something communities build together.
The current common sense of #neoliberal worldview replaces trust with greed as the social motivator. The problem is that every successful society is built on trust. When you undermine trust, you build a #deathcult. Climate breakdown, inequality, social isolation and failing public institutions are not accidents – they’re the predictable outcomes.
When people recognise the problem, ask them what the solution is. Most will instinctively reach for the same neoliberal “common sense” that created the crisis. That’s the moment to gently point out that those ideas are part of the #deathcult, not a way out.
The alternative starts with rebuilding trust, commons and community, #FOSS needs to become a core to this.
Facts matter, technology matters, governance matters. But people rarely change because they read theory, a specification or a list of features. People change because of stories, this is why storytelling is central to the #OMN path. A story gives people somewhere to stand, it connects ideas to lived experience.
Instead of explaining the #4opens as an abstract framework, tell the story of a community escaping a #dotcons platform by building trust on the #openweb. Instead of arguing about governance, tell the story of how a group solved a conflict through #OpenProcess. Instead of listing technical features, tell the story of someone who regained control of their community tech after years of platform lock-in.
Stories carry values, the last forty years of #mainstreaming have been held together by stories about competition, consumption and individual success. These stories have normalised the #deathcult, making extraction and enclosure feel like “common sense.” We now need better stories about cooperation instead of competition, commons balancing ownership, about trust instead of surveillance. Stories about building rather than consuming.
The #Fediverse itself is a story, an accidental reboot of the #openweb that proves another internet is possible. It isn’t perfect, but it demonstrates that people can build social infrastructure without billionaires directing the conversation.
The challenge is that the academics or the #geekproblem tell stories only to other, academics or geeks, technical and academic paths are important, but they don’t inspire people to act, so we need stories that people can understand:
A neighbourhood rebuilding local media.
Boaters organising to defend the waterways as a commons.
Volunteers composting #techchurn into useful tools.
Ordinary people discovering that they can build infrastructure together.
These stories become shared memory, shared memory becomes culture, culture shapes “common sense.” and changing common sense is how lasting social change happens. So don’t just build software or academic theory, tell stories that help people imagine themselves as part of a healthier #openweb.
Need to come back to this, as people still are not seeing the value or use. The #4opens is a simple, practical tool for evaluating and guiding grassroots technology, media and social projects. Rather than asking whether a project is simply “open source”, it asks a broader question – can people actually trust this project to remain part of the commons? The #4opens helps distinguish native #openweb projects from #closedweb platforms and projects that have drifted into corporate, bureaucratic or #NGO capture. It is as much about social trust as it is about technology.
The Four Opens:
Open data is the foundation. The content, metadata and information created by a project should be openly accessible, portable and reusable. People should be able to export data, archive it independently and move between codebases without losing years of work. Open examples: Wikipedia content can be copied and mirrored, Mastodon users can export their accounts and migrate between instances, RSS feeds allow content to flow between different tools. Closed examples: Facebook owns your social graph, Instagram traps your audience, TikTok keeps your community inside its walls. Open data prevents lock-in and keeps knowledge in the commons.
Open Source. The software itself should be available under a free software licence. Anyone should be able to inspect the code, improve it, fix bugs, adapt it for local needs or fork it if necessary. Open examples: Mastodon, PeerTube, WordPress, MediaWiki, Linux. Closed examples: Facebook, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams But #4opens goes further than #FOSS, open code alone does not create an open project.
Open Standards. Projects should communicate using open protocols rather than proprietary APIs. Open standards allow different communities to use different software while remaining connected. Examples include: ActivityPub, RSS, email (SMTP/IMAP), HTTP, HTML This creates federation instead of monopolies, a Mastodon server can communicate with a PeerTube instance, an RSS reader can subscribe to thousands of independent websites. No central company owns these conversations. Contrast this with: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Discord, Teams as each creates its own isolated island. Open standards create ecosystems rather than products.
Open Process. This is the missing piece. Many projects are technically open while socially closed. Open Process asks: Who actually makes decisions? How are disagreements handled? Can newcomers participate? Is governance visible? Can communities influence direction? Is power accountable? Without open process, “open source” becomes: founder dictatorship, hidden hierarchies, developer elitism, endless forks, NGO capture and corporate capture. Open Process keeps projects alive as commons rather than products. This is why #4opens adds the social layer missing from some traditional #FOSS thinking.
An example of how it can work – The #4opens deliberately keeps things simple, projects can roughly assess themselves, others can assess them – people aggregate the results.
2 Opens — Bronze
3 Opens — Silver
4 Opens — Gold
This is horizontal – point of this isn’t certification, it is encouraging projects to become progressively more open.
Examples:
Wikipedia
✔ Open Data
✔ Open Source
✔ Open Standards
✔ Open Process (imperfect but visible)
A Gold project.
Mastodon
Generally Gold. However, individual instances vary enormously, a technically open instance with opaque moderation becomes weaker on Open Process. Technology is only half the story.
PeerTube
Strong across all four opens as it provides decentralised video hosting without surrendering control to YouTube.
Excellent encryption, good open source, weak federation as governance remains centralised. Strong tool for private communication, but not a complete #openweb social infrastructure.
So why open process matters – Many grassroots projects fail here, the code is open, the data might be open. But decisions happen behind closed doors, so that power accumulates around: maintainers, foundations, funding, celebrities, NGOs. Eventually communities lose trust, people fork, energy fragments. Nothing grows, the technical project survives but the social project dies. The #4opens recognises this pattern.
It is at root a tool for composting – the #4opens isn’t a purity test, nobody starts perfect, instead it asks – Which direction are we moving? Projects drift, communities drift, funding changes, people leave. The #4opens gives us a simple way to notice when projects are becoming enclosed. Instead of abandoning them, we can compost the mess, repair governance, open the data, document the process to replace hidden power with visible trust. The Open Media Network builds directly on the #4opens, the aim is not simply better software, it is social infrastructure that communities can actually #DIY themselves.
People can grow, infrastructure based on trust rather than surveillance, federation rather than monopoly, commons rather than platforms, participation rather than consumption and cooperation rather than extraction. Technology is simply the tool, the real project is rebuilding the commons.
A simple question to ask is, whenever you encounter a new project, ask four questions:
Can I get my data out?
Can I inspect or improve the code?
Can I communicate with other systems?
Can I see how decisions are made?
If the answer is “yes” to all four, you’re probably looking at a native #openweb project. If not, you’re probably feeding another #closedweb platform. The #4opens won’t solve every problem, but they do provide a remarkably effective compass for navigating the difference between projects that grow the commons and projects that quietly enclose it.
Three years ago I wrote: “I get the feeling we are running on dregs on the #fediverse dev side. Social movements come in waves; this one is ebbing into the #mainstreaming. No bad thing, but not, I think, what any of us want for ‘our’ #openweb.”
Looking back, I wonder what has actually changed – and more importantly, what have we learned? The #Fediverse has grown, more people know about decentralised social media, more organisations are paying attention, and the ideas that once lived mostly in activist and technical circles have moved closer to the #mainstreaming.
But growth always brings questions – What happens when movements become successful enough that the surrounding culture starts changing? The early #openweb was built around different assumptions that people have agency, communities shaping their own spaces, experimentation over optimisation, trust over control and commons over platforms. The #mainstreaming process brings different pressures of scale, professionalisation, funding, institutional legitimacy, standardisation and “safe” governance structures.
None of these things are automatically bad. A movement cannot stay frozen in its early phase forever, but there is a risk that the thing being scaled is only the technology, while the culture that gave it meaning gets diluted. Maybe we need to talk more about how the #openweb was never just about protocols, federation is a technical idea, living commons is a social one. Three years on, the challenge is still the same, how do we grow without losing the roots? The #OMN view has always been that we need both:
The fluffy path — welcoming people, building bridges, making things usable.
The spiky path — challenging capture, resisting enclosure, keeping power visible.
Without the fluffy path, alternatives stay small and isolated. Without the spiky path, alternatives get absorbed into the same systems they were meant to challenge. So maybe the question is not “did the Fediverse win?” The question is more what kind of victory are we building towards? A bigger version of the old internet? Or a genuinely different culture of communication? This question is still the work, the seeds are there, but are we are tending the garden, or just watching the weeds grow.
It might be useful to look at a narrow view of this. The #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) world is one of the greatest successes of the #openweb era. Without it there would be no Linux, no Apache, no Firefox, no Wikipedia-scale infrastructure, no Fediverse, and much of the internet would simply not function. The culture has produced extraordinary amounts of shared value. But from an #OMN perspective, success should not stop us looking critically at the social dynamics underneath. The question is not whether #FOSS works. The question is: who does it work for, where does it struggle, and what can we learn from both?
A resent example, from a native #openweb perspective, this non “just fork it” diatribe is not about code at all, more how we misunderstand collective work in an age of growing #stupidindividualism. The #geekproblem framing treats open source as a marketplace of sovereign individuals – I do my work. You do yours. If you don’t like it, go away and rebuild it alone. That looks like freedom, but it’s actually a deep cultural narrowing. Because what gets erased in that framing is the social fabric that makes FOSS work in the first place, yes, technically you can fork, walk away and rebuild. But socially, that’s not neutral. It assumes that collective effort is disposable and that coordination is optional. That’s where #stupidindividualism kicks in, the fantasy that all meaningful action is just isolated agents choosing between exit options.
In reality, most functioning open source systems are not built on exit, they are built on ongoing relationships between contributors, trust built through repeated interaction, informal negotiation of direction, shared norms about responsibility and maintenance and a lot of invisible care work that never shows up in the code. The “just fork it” response hides this by pretending power is symmetrical, it isn’t. Maintainers don’t just “own code” – they sit at choke points of attention, merge authority, reputation, and continuity. Forking isn’t just copying code; it’s rebuilding all of that social infrastructure from scratch. So when “just fork it” is used as a dismissal, it’s not a statement about technical freedom, it’s a way of closing down negotiation while maintaining the appearance of openness.
That’s the concern, not whether forks are possible, but how often they are used to avoid the harder work of collective problem-solving in shared space. Because there are two very different meanings of forking:
Healthy fork (fluffy) based on experimentation, divergence where needs differ, pluralism in practice and sometimes leading back to upstream collaboration.
Fragmentation fork (spiky reality of #stupidindividualism) growing from social breakdown disguised as technical freedom, loss of shared direction, duplication of effort due to failed mediation and communities replaced by isolated projects.
The distinction is not technical – it’s social coherence before the fork happens. In a healthy #openweb culture, “fork it” is a last resort after dialogue has failed, differences are irreconcilable or experimentation genuinely needs independence. Were in #stupidindividualism culture, it becomes the first reflex with disagreement → exit → rebuild alone → repeat fragmentation cycle. That cycle produces the illusion of freedom while steadily destroying any shared capacity that builds real freedom.
The real question is not “Do you have the right to fork?” Of course, you do. The real question is “Are we maintaining enough shared social infrastructure that we don’t always have to?” Because if every disagreement becomes a fork, then we don’t have ecosystems – we have atomised toolboxes with no collective memory. And at that point, the system is no longer open in any meaningful sense. It is just individualism with better licensing.
The commons → #geekproblem → meritocracy → forking → #stupidindividualism. But on a positive note from an #OMN perspective, #FOSS remains one of the healthiest cultures we have. The challenge is not to abandon it, but to compost the #geekproblem and grow stronger social practices alongside the technical ones. The future of the #openweb depends on both.
In this mess we have to keep shovelling to compost the negative smell of #fashionista – That is a socio-political and tech-subculture #hashtag used to describe performative activists, influencers, or lifestyle subcultural participants from the grassroots, open-source tech, and radical political communities who prioritize the aesthetic and language of activism over the unglamorous, foundational work of building actual structures.
Performative engagement, trendy slogans and identity-driven rhetoric over substantive, embedded organisation.
Echo chambers, exclusive, inward-facing discussions that fail to translate into any impact.
Trend hopping, between “ethical” or radical tech and social projects without committing in meaningfully ways to their development or maintenance.
A #blocking cultural tendency to adopt a radical or alternative aesthetic without understanding or participating in the unglamorous work required to enact actual change or challenge.
Let’s be clear on the background mess, before the personal attacks start, this is not about individuals. It is about patterns, systems and ideas. The danger is that criticism becomes an #adHominem argument – “you just dislike this because…” – instead of looking at the actual structures being discussed.
The point I am making is that parts of dead #postmodern thinking have ended up embedded inside #neoliberal culture: fragmentation, individual identity, endless discourse and difficulty building any shared collective action. That does not mean every idea, person or piece of work in those spaces is the same, it means we need to look at how ideas interact with power.
The question is – What helps us build collective capacity in a time of #climatechaos, inequality and the #dotcons mess? What creates commons? What creates shared action? This is the conversation.
So with that in mind lets look at the major problem with the #dotcons attention economy the advertising model. The platform logic and the attention economy are now becoming harder to simply ignore. For most of mass media history, the commercial transformation of media was hidden behind a layer of journalism, culture and public value. The advertising model was presented as simply a way to pay for content. Platforms were presented as neutral spaces for communication. Algorithms were presented as tools to help people discover what mattered.
But the #dotcons direction has now stripped this bare – the direction has become clearer, the media landscape looks less like a place for shared knowledge and more like a shopping catalogue with occasional content attached. The focus is no longer even the fig leaf of informing people, connecting communities or building public understanding. The naked goal is simple – more clicks, more engagement, more time captured, more data collected and more consumption encouraged. This is the logic of the #dotcons.
The problem with this #deathcult worshipping mess is not only that companies make money. The deeper problem is that the structures built around making money reshape our culture itself. When attention becomes the product, everything starts being measured through extraction. A story is only valuable because it generates traffic – A person is only valuable because they generate data – A community is valuable because it creates engagement – A conversation is valuable because it keeps people inside the platforms. Any, social value gets pushed aside.
The original #openweb grew from a different idea. People built websites, forums, mailing lists, software projects and communities because they wanted to share, collaborate and create. The value was not only in the information produced, the value was in the surrounding relationships. People corrected each other, developed trust, knowledge was maintained collectively.
The internet worked because there was social infrastructure around the technical infrastructure. The mess we made, was thinking that communication could simply be handed over to commercial platforms without catastrophic changing the nature of communication itself. A platform is not just a tool, it comes with incentives, has owners, rules, a business model. When every space becomes a marketplace, the culture changes.
The mess we have made is that extraction replaces participation, the #dotcons path works by turning human activity into resources. People create, platforms capture. Communities produce culture, companies monetise attention. That extraction eventually damages the thing being extracted from, creators become exhausted, communities fragmented, trust declines as people become audiences instead of participants.
The internet becomes full of “content”, but much poorer in meaning, more information does not automatically create more knowledge, more communication does not automatically create better communities, without care, context and collective responsibility, abundance becomes noise. To compost this mess we have made in the media tech path – the question is not “How do we get more people producing?” The question is “How do we build systems where what people produce strengthens the commons instead of feeding extraction?”
The fashionable people of #AI are pushing at changing the scale of content creation, lowering barriers to producing books, apps, music, legal documents and academic papers. Thus, “output” is exploding. But the #OMN second question is what happens when production grows faster than the ability to filter, discuss, trust and maintain? More books, but more noise, More apps, but more clutter. More papers, more pressure on review systems, more music, but harder to value human creativity.
The #dotcons logic says: more content = more value. The #openweb lesson is different – value comes from communities, trust, context and care. We don’t just need more production, we need better commons, better mediation and better ways to separate signal from noise.
The current wave of generative AI (#GenAI) is presented as inevitable, the message is everywhere: adapt, adopt, integrate, or be left behind. But technology is not neutral, as every tool carries assumptions – who benefits, who controls, what values are embedded, and what damage is accepted as “the price of progress”.
From a #OMN perspective, the question is not simply “can this technology do impressive things?” Of course, it can. The question is what kind of society does this technology build? Does it strengthen human creativity, collective intelligence and open participation? Or does it deepen the existing #dotcons path of centralisation, extraction, dependency and enclosure? The promise and the reality of large language models (#LLM) represent a technical development, they can summarise information, translate languages, generate text, assist coding, and help people interact with large amounts of information. These are real, if floored capabilities.
But the current #techshit hype jumps from useful assistance to much bigger claims: that these systems will replace expertise, solve social problems, revolutionise education, transform science, and create a better future. This is currently not true, and, on the LLM path will never be true as the current GenAI systems do not understand the world. They generate likely patterns based on huge amounts of training data. They do not know truth from falsehood, meaning from appearance, or ethics from probability, a convincing answer is not the same as a system that understands. This matters because the native #openweb was built on a different idea, that knowledge comes from people, communities, discussion, correction and shared responsibility.
The #geekproblem is confusing capability with wisdom is a recurring problem in technology culture – it is the assumption that if something can be built, it should be built. The technical question becomes “Can we?” while the social question “Should we?” gets pushed aside. This is part of what #OMN calls the #geekproblem – the tendency to reduce complex social questions into technical problems. A better search algorithm does not automatically create a healthier information system, a faster way to generate content does not automatically create better knowledge. More automation does not automatically create more freedom. The missing piece is the social context around the technology.
Then we come to the ecological cost of scaling, the current GenAI boom depends on enormous infrastructure. In the era of out of control #climatechaos data centres require huge amounts of electricity, water for cooling, specialised hardware, constant replacement cycles leading to massive extraction of resources. At a time of #climatechaos, we should be asking whether increasing consumption is the only path available.
The lesson is not that technology is bad, the lesson is that technology without social responsibility becomes a tool for whoever already has power. The question is not “how do we make AI bigger?” more it is how do we make technology serve human communities rather than making communities serve technology control systems, it is about who controls. The current dominant systems are owned by a few powerful companies controlled by the #nastyfew actively working to destroy our ecology and societies.
The future is not decided by whether we use AI, it is decided by whether we allow the same old #dotcons logic to shape every new technology. The work remains the same to build alternatives, keep processes open, grow the commons. The answer is not simply rejecting technology, the #openweb has never been anti-technology. The question is what kind of technology grows from what kind of culture. We need tools that strengthen human networks, not replace them. Tools that support commons, not enclosure, that increase agency, not dependency.
If we change this can there be an ethical AI? A socially useful technology? Possibly, but it would require a very different path, it would need many of the things the #openweb has argued for from the beginning.
One of the things missing from conversations about rebuilding radical networks is that we defult to looking first at the technology. The #OMN question is different – What are the social systems that allow alternatives to survive?
A useful example comes from the history of the Rainbow Gatherings. To an outsider, the strangest thing about a Rainbow Gathering is likely the hippies, the second is the absence of money. Thousands of people gather in forests, share food, organise care, create culture and then disappear again – without tickets, vendors or commercial stages. This can look like a quirky tradition, but there are lessons – the absence of commerce was never just a rule, it was the point. The idea was simple – If you want to show that another society is possible, you cannot only argue against the existing system, you have to create a working alternative.
The non-commercial path was the message, a living example of a working alternative logic. The early Rainbow organisers came out of the Vietnam War veterans and the antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were asking a question that still matters – How do you challenge a system built around war, competition, consumption and hierarchy? One answer was confrontation, another answer was demonstration. the rainbow path was instead of only fighting the existing culture, was to create a space where different values operate with shared resources, mutual aid, no buying and selling, no central authority. People contributing what they can and receiving what they need.
The Free Store experiments and early free festivals showed this approach in practice. The gathering itself became temporary commons – a place where the normal rules of the market were suspended. The important part was not the camping, not the festival. It is the social infrastructure underneath – Food does not appear magically, care does not happen automatically, conflict does not disappear.
A commons requires trust, participation, shared responsibility, informal governance and a culture of contribution. This is the part missing from technology discussions, people imagine the #openweb as about tools – Protocols – Platforms – Software. But the deeper layer is social, the software only works because communities create meaning around it.
The #OMN connection is that this is the same lesson for radical media networks. #Indymedia was never only a publishing platform, It was a social path, the technology enabled publishing, but the power came from the culture of open participation, collective editing and local autonomy to build shared responsibility.
The failure of this network was not simply technical, like many commons, the challenge was maintaining the social practices that made the technology meaningful. A reboot cannot just recreate the tools, it has to regrow the conditions that allowed the tools to matter in a world beyond the market logic.
The #dotcons path blindly pushes – create a product, grow users, extract value, centralise control.
The commons model works differently – create relationships, grow trust, share value to distribute power.
This does not mean money disappears from the world. The Rainbow example itself shows this complexity. People still need resources. Food still has to be bought somewhere. The outside economy still exists. The difference is where the organising principle sits. Does money organise the community? Or does the community organise resources?
That is the question that matters, it’s the danger of rebuilding the same common sense system – that many alternative paths fail because they challenge the surface while reproducing the structure underneath. A shiny platform can still become a gatekeeper, a new network can still become centralised. A new media system can still become extractive. The question is not only “Is the technology open?” The question is also “Is the culture open?”
The Rainbow Gatherings survived because they were not trying to build a better marketplace. They were trying to practice another way of organising, that is the deeper #openweb lesson. We do not just need alternative tools, we need alternative relationships with tools. It is about creating spaces where people can trust, participate, maintain and build together.
The #OMN vision is not a replacement platform, it is a garden, the technology is the soil, the people are the gardeners, the commons are what grows.
